According to a Book of Lists survey, 41% of people’s biggest fear is “public speaking”. To put that into perspective, “death” is the biggest fear for 19%, “flying” for 18% and “clowns” don’t even register (which does make me seriously doubt the survey’s credibility).

I gave my first public presentation at IOUG Collaborate 2015 last week in Las Vegas and I didn’t die.

Why did do make your presentation debut at the second largest Oracle event on the calendar? Excellent question.

With SmartScans being the most important (and most unique) performance feature for Exadata, it’s incredibly useful to measure how well you’re making use of it.

But how?

There are a number of ways you can measure this, but none of these seem to be the DEFINITIVE method to do so. Instead, it’s probably a good idea to more than one formula, if not all, to get a good idea of our SmartScan usage.

Why are there multiple formulas? Because the existing database metrics don’t quite capture what we’re looking to measure. For instance:

‘physical read total bytes‘ – is all the data including compressed data AND SmartScan-ineligible data.

‘cell physical IO interconnect bytes‘ – includes the writes (multiplied due to ASM mirroring) AND the reads.

‘cell IO uncompressed bytes‘ – is the data volume for predicate offloading AFTER the Storage Index filtering and any decompression

I will be presenting DBA 3.0 or “How to Become a Real-World Exadata DBA” at Collaborate 2015 – IOUG’s annual user conference – from April 12th to 16th at the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino in Las Vegas. I submitted this as my abstract:

“DBA resources are more scarce than ever before and it can be very difficult to allocate time on anything but keeping the lights on – even when an organization has made a (substantial) hardware investment in Exadata.

However, if Exadata is treated like any other Oracle database, the promised “extreme performance” will likely be very underwhelming to developers, users and managers and can become unwieldy for DBAs to support.

On the other hand, when an organization configures and supports Exadata properly, they can realize exponential performance improvements in key IT infrastructure, can facilitate better business decisions and may actually reduce infrastructure costs.

The customer has bought a sports car – but might not realize that they haven’t taken it out of second gear (yet).

I will talk about the evolution of Exadata and then get into the “nuts and bolts” of how to support a high-performance Exadata environment as a Production DBA.

I will discuss how to get performance improvements of up to 20x, what NOT to do as an Exadata DBA and how Exadata can become the foundation of your organization’s high-performance enterprise infrastructure.”

Dan Norris of the Maximum Availability Architecture team gave what sounded like a very interesting presentation at UKOUG 2014. There seemed to be a lot of really cool stuff at this year’s event, which is to be expected as I no longer reside in the UK!

I encourage you to take a look at the slides, but also at the interesting links he provided:

Like this:

Quite by chance, I noticed today that Oracle are now offering an exachk-like health check for non-Exadata systems: ORAchk.

This includes some of the exachk functionality and replaces the RACcheck tool for Oracle databases (both clustered and single-instance).

One of the components of ORAchk is the Collection Manager, a ApEx web app, which provides a unified dashboard view of collections (ORAchk, RACcheck and exachk) across your environment.

The Collection Manager uses ApEx 4.2 and can be run against all editions of the database (XE, SE1, SE, EE) 10.2.0.4 or higher. It is supported as part of your support contract, with the exception of the XE edition – you’ll have to visit the OTN forums for help with that.

There are two features in particular which interest me: the ability to compare different health check runs and the creation of incidents for tracking of issues.

Oddly enough, I had just started to create my own system to do just this today – which would have only provided a fraction of what this does, of course. I just need to find somewhere to run ApEx, a spare database and to brush up on my ApEx knowledge.

As a slight tangent, I think it’s a little strange that Oracle are running this on ApEx. I presume this is because it’s an early version and I would imagine that this – along with the OCM/ASR functionality – might end up making its way into a future release of OEM pretty soon as Oracle continue to mature the management of Exadata and its cohorts.